this is my issue with the whole thing. the reaction only comes when there's an injury. there is no consistency. as you said, you can do what you want, if the other player doesn't wind up injured.

To be honest if Slater gets straight up I wouldn't have scrutinised the replay. We also would've have had so much down-time in the game to see the replay so many times. Penalty given and we all move on.

However with an injury like what happened to Slater, the NRL SHOULD be looking at incidents like that.We should be asking "what went wrong? Why did this happen? Is there anything we need to change in our rules so that we can minimise the chance of this happening again?" but don't be reactive in terms of punishment based on the injury - set a new precedent that everyone is aware of and communicate it out so that we don't see players copping heavy knocks to the head like that, or at least not so often.

At 6 weeks off, it's effectively a grade 4 without the possibility of an early guilty plea. It could even be considered to be less because I don't think he'll keep 60 carry over points from a direct, ungraded referral.

Which begs the question... what do you have to do to earn a grade 5? Jesus.

Its nuts the reading through social media the massive variation in peoples views on this. People throwing 12 weeks around, others saying 2 weeks. If you wanted to read into that, you'd say that this is proof that the rules are inconsistently applied that people just have no idea.

Slater himself is a fairly polarising figure. Has many Fan boys ready to drop to their knees in his presence, but also has many haters. Its good to see that in this case, no blame is on him from the public. Not that there is much room for it.

I don't think Slater slipping wouldn't have made a big difference... looking at the footage he would've been hit high either way (Slater is pretty short).It could've easily smashed his troublesome left shoulder and ruled Slater out for a lot longer.

The "slipping" argument is what is going to help Soliola at the judiciary tonight

@Fortitude wrote:Its nuts the reading through social media the massive variation in peoples views on this. People throwing 12 weeks around, others saying 2 weeks. If you wanted to read into that, you'd say that this is proof that the rules are inconsistently applied that people just have no idea.

Slater himself is a fairly polarising figure. Has many Fan boys ready to drop to their knees in his presence, but also has many haters. Its good to see that in this case, no blame is on him from the public. Not that there is much room for it.

Whilst the rules are undoubtedly inconsistently applied, I'm not surprised there is such a variation in opinion on this one - it is a fairly unique scenario.

On one hand, there was obvious intent (to hit Slater late) but on the other hand no intent (to hit Slater high).

Based on that I'd land somewhere in the middle and subjectively give him a 2 week rest.

The case does highlight a problem with trying to assign black and white rulings for the sake of consistency because there will always be a unique scenario that occurs and you can guarantee a lot of people will be unhappy with whatever the decision ends up.